On a Thursday in June, a crowd gathered on the new playing surface at Washington-Grizzly Stadium and watched a man cut a ceremonial ribbon with a knife instead of scissors. That was not a stunt. Josh Smith is the founder of Montana Knife Company, a Missoula-based knife maker, and Montana Knife Company had just become the first-ever on-field logo sponsor in the stadium's history. The company's mark now sits on both 25-yard lines, opposite the Big Sky Conference logo, on a brand-new FieldTurf Vertex CORE surface.
That single ribbon-cutting is worth pausing on, because it tells you something about how this football season sits differently in Missoula than the last one did. The field itself changed. The person leading the program changed. And the name now written into the ground belongs to a business that started here, not a bank or an airline flown in for the exposure.
The Sponsor Nobody Expected
This is the first year the NCAA has allowed permanent sponsor logos on college football fields at all. Across the country, most programs signing their first on-field deal reached for the obvious candidate: a regional bank, an insurance company, a national retailer with a marketing budget built for exactly this kind of placement. The University of Montana signed an eight-year agreement with a knife company headquartered a few miles from the stadium, run by a bladesmith who has talked publicly about building his business out of Lincoln, Montana.
Athletic director Kent Haslam stood at the ribbon-cutting and said the new look "means something to a lot of people." The on-field branding update, which includes the Montana Knife Company logos, refreshed fight-song lyrics stitched along both sidelines, and a redrawn bear logo at midfield, carried a price tag of roughly $700,000, according to reporting from the Billings Gazette. For a program that could have sold that space to almost anyone, choosing a Missoula manufacturer for its national debut of field-level branding is a decision about identity as much as revenue.
Forty Years, Four Surfaces
This season also marks 40 years since Washington-Grizzly Stadium opened in October 1986, after the Grizzlies spent decades playing first at a downtown field near the old Missoulian newspaper office, then at Dornblaser Field on South Campus. The FieldTurf Vertex CORE installed this June is the fourth different playing surface the stadium has had in that span, following an original grass field, a SprinTurf surface installed before the 2001 season and paid for by an anonymous donor, and a second SprinTurf laid down during the 2008 north end zone expansion. Roughly once a decade, the ground under the Griz gets replaced. This is the year it happened again, and it happened with a hometown name on it.
A New Coach Walks Onto a Rewritten Field
The other change this fall has nothing to do with turf. Bobby Kennedy took over as head coach this season, the first time since 2017 that anyone other than Bobby Hauck has led the program into a season. Kennedy inherited a team that opened the year ranked No. 2 nationally and carrying a 22-game home-opener winning streak into the August 29 opener against Southern Utah. The Griz won that one to start Kennedy's tenure 1-0, then rolled past Drake 45-10 the following week, a game in which running back Eli Gillman set new marks in a career day for the offense. That put Kennedy's first two Saturdays at 2-0 heading into the Utah Tech game on September 12, which means Missoula spent the opening weeks of the season watching a program that changed its coach, its playing surface and its field-level sponsor all in the same offseason, and still won the games it was supposed to win.
Here is the rest of the home schedule, for anyone planning a fall around it:
| Date | Opponent | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Aug. 29 | Southern Utah | Season opener, home-opener streak extended |
| Sept. 5 | Drake | 45-10 win |
| Sept. 12 | Utah Tech | Blazers' Big Sky debut season |
| Oct. 3 | Northern Colorado | Homecoming, 2 p.m. kickoff to allow time for the parade |
| Oct. 17 | Idaho | Little Brown Stein rivalry game |
| Nov. 7 | Portland State | |
| Nov. 14 | Idaho State | Night game, broadcast nationally on ESPN |
Where the Ritual Spills Downtown
None of this lives only inside the stadium walls. Jenae and Peggy Floyd have parked the same 1972 bus in the same tailgate spot on Campus Drive for more than two decades, decked out with a turf floor and old team photos. A few rows over, Billy McNulty holds down a spot near the Grizzly Gateway and says football season is really about feeding a hundred of his closest friends every week. Those two tailgates alone say more about what a Griz Saturday is than any stat about attendance.
Washington-Grizzly Stadium holds 25,217 people at capacity, enough that Destination Missoula, the city's visitor bureau, has described the stadium on gameday as becoming the sixth-largest town in Montana for an afternoon. Stadium Journey ranked it first in the country on its 2025 list of top FCS stadiums. When the stadium empties out, the crowd does not just go home. Locals-only dives like Red's Bar and Missoula Club fill up downtown, and for a mellower postgame, Tamarack Brewing, Thomas Meagher Bar and The Iron Horse pull their share of maroon and silver too. On Homecoming weekend, that downtown loop becomes official: the parade runs down Higgins Avenue, crosses the Beartracks Bridge, and turns onto University Avenue toward campus, while UM alumni traditionally gather beforehand for Griz on Tap at Red's Bar on South Ryman Street. This year, Homecoming falls on October 3 against Northern Colorado, with kickoff pushed to 2 p.m. specifically to leave room for the parade to run its course first.
What This Season Actually Marks
Put the pieces together and the throughline is not really about wins and losses. It is that Griz gameday now runs on Missoula's own commercial life in a way it did not before. The team's most visible new asset, the ground its players stand on every Saturday, belongs in part to a knife company that started in Lincoln and grew up in this town. The bars that fill in after the final whistle are not chains bused in for the season, they are the same Red's Bar and Missoula Club that host alumni events during Homecoming week. Even the tailgate lots are held by families who have occupied the same twenty square feet of asphalt since before some of this year's freshmen were born.
A stadium can change its turf, its coach and its sponsor in a single offseason and still feel like the same Saturday it has always been, because the people and the businesses filling in around it did not change at all. That continuity, more than any single score, is what makes this particular fall worth paying attention to if you already call Missoula home.
Ashley Inglis lives and works across Western Montana and follows this town as closely as she follows its market. If you're curious about what else is shifting in Missoula this season, or just want to compare tailgate notes, reach out to Ashley Inglis any time.
